Administering mental energy

Like time and money, energy is a limited resource. It means that we have to be careful how we spend it, otherwise there won’t be enough to manage our life. PTSD and dissociation use up a good amount of our energy, so that our stores are slimmer than those of other people. It means that our options are more limited, including our ability to work hard in therapy while keeping up a moderately stable life.

I stumbled over the concept of stewardship of mental energy here and although I am far from being good at this I want to share it with you. Maybe it can show you the next step in your own journey.

 

Managing mental energy is not that different from managing money. We have some kind of income, the energy our body is able to create for us,

we have expenses, some fixed and some flexible and our struggle is to stay within our energy budget.

Our trauma history can be seen as debt we need to pay off before we are free of the burden of paying interest, in the form of flashbacks and other symptoms.

 

 

Increasing our income

Before we can even think of paying off dept we need to have something we can throw at it. We need to build up some more strength and mental energy before we can invest into paying something off. We can increase our income through self-care. That is why Ts always preach this in phase 1 of therapy. It is not to make us feel stupid about our lack of it. There is a method to this. Let me explain.

• Food: our body needs fuel. That means a decent amount of carbohydrates, protein and fat, enough calories to burn. It also needs all kinds of minerals and vitamins to make the body, and that includes the brain, function. A good diet can reduce anxiety and depression. Regular meals reduce stress. Good nutrition is like medicine and it will give our body everything it needs to be fit and strong. With a strong nervous system we gain mental energy too. Staying hydrated ensures that our brain can function well.
• Sleep: during sleep we recover and process the day. Our body switches from activity to restoration. We are not wasting time when we sleep, the body is active, restoring our energy.
• Exercise: when we build up endurance and strength we will feel fitter and more energized. It takes physical energy, but during exercise our body also releases substances that fight anxiety, depression and hyperarousal and that counter stress and increases our mental energy levels.
• Rest: It is easy to get lost in functioning and ignore the body for long periods of time. And relaxation can feel very uncomfortable. But we need it very much to build up some energy. Too much rest is not helping, but neither will overworking yourself. Make it a goal to take one day of the week off, to sometimes have a long weekend and to make use of your vacation (and not for deep-cleaning your home!) When we are exhausted we are more vulnerable for flashbacks and dysregulation that can result in dissociation or self-harm, all things that will just cost us even more energy when we have nothing to spare.
• Health: take care of medical issues. They cost you dearly when they go untreated. See your dentist (help for that here). Get your blood tested. Manage pain before it becomes an overwhelming problem. Being healthy will not just keep you from wasting energy, it will also add to it.
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I will not go into all the details. Take care of your physical needs. When they are not met, it always costs us energy we could spend on something else.

The same is true for our emotional, relational, social, spiritual and all the other needs:

• Safety: not being/feeling safe is another place where we tend to waste energy. It takes a lot to stay hypervigilant for threats and to keep up our defenses constantly. Increasing safety can help us to cut these costs and it will support relaxation, which is key to gaining new energy.
• Structure: a chaotic lifestyle without any rhythm or structure will cost you a lot of energy that you need to spend on keeping track of everything, managing things that seem to pop up unexpectedly and running late. It is very stressful. Structure and organization helps your mind and your body relax because you are in control and know what to expect next.
• Relationships: Supportive relationships can be a source of hope and love and belonging. We need them. Isolation is one of the main reasons for suicides. Spending time with safe people can restore our inner batteries.
• Positive experiences: doing nice things, creating safe and social experiences, can make life feel lighter and happier. It doesn’t have to be anything big. Something small and mindful can help us out too.
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Advanced

There are a few more things that we can learn that will help us long-term. They need more brain work and focus, so they might not be available at first, but can be added later

• setting priorities that serve you well, making sure you spend your energy in the best possible way
• meeting needs and keeping the long-term effects of choices in mind
• flexible valued goals that you can adapt if necessary but that will also give you something to focus your energy on
• planning improves your efficiency of reaching a goal
• time management to make sure there is no extra pressure
• cooperation within the DID system, so that we generally move in more unity and reduce struggles as well as independent actions.
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(more posts on advanced skills coming soon)

 

All this and any effort to meet our other needs will increase our energy levels a bit.

Self-care follows the law of sowing and reaping. We have to sow/invest some energy into a process that will let us gain more energy. That means that for some people it has to happen in tiny steps because they don’t have much to invest. It does not make sense to overwhelm ourselves in attempts to take care of ourselves and drain ourselves in the process. Pick one area and ask yourself: what is one small thing I can do right now to make it a tiny bit better? Then do that.

 

 

Cutting our costs

We need to take a critical look at our energy spending habits to find the right places to cut costs without cutting off too many valuable resources. Some things might not have to be cut, just modified to an energy-saving program.

• Work: if you can work this will probably consume a lot of your energy. If it is meaningful work it can be a source of self-esteem and add to your stability, so it adds value. It is also a place where you might have to consider cuts. That could be reducing work hours, changing to a position with less responsibility or work load, setting better boundaries when it comes to overtime hours and weekend work, reducing stress at work and for some it might mean taking a break altogether. Always consider finances in your decisions. Poverty is a painful energy-eater that can keep you in constant anxiety and stress. This should be avoided.
• Adulting: we all need to do that to some degree. But sometimes we are unnecessarily complicated about it. Simplify your life and the way you do things. Nobody will punish you for not doing everything perfectly, let it go. We find it very helpful to talk about our adulting with healthier friends. It turns out that they don’t scrub their toilet every single day. Find support by delegating tasks to your spouse or older children or pay someone to do certain things for you.
• Family: the most difficult place to set boundaries is with family, but it’s probably also the most important. Your T will help you learn this step by step. You don’t have to nurse your abusive parent. Let professional people do that. You don’t have to go to family celebrations, you don’t owe that to anyone. You don’t have to help your sister move because she wants to save money by not hiring someone for that. You can love them with all your heart while saying no to over-spending your physical and mental energy. If they love and appreciate you they wouldn’t want you to do that anyway. If they don’t, why would you even do that for them?
• Drama: if there is any drama in your life, find a way to cut that off. Maybe your relationship skills aren’t that good, you never had a good role model and you somehow end up creating your own drama. Your T can help you to get better. Maybe others are the source of drama and you can set boundaries and step off the stage. Often it is a dynamic that costs everyone tons of energy. Work on sorting that out.
• Life: maybe you volunteer, try to support other survivors in a self-help group, have pets that need your attention, you serve in a church or play in a band etc. These can all be great resources, but they also cost energy. Try to reduce, simplify and modify. Say „no“ more often. It hurts, but if you are trying to free some energy you need to make some cuts. Talk to your T about where it makes the most sense. Sometimes it helps to even just take a break from something and return to it later.
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When it comes to cutting costs it is important to keep balance in mind. Sometimes we have to cut out things that meet some of our needs but cost us too much energy in total. And often we first have to learn the skills that enable us to cut out costly energy-eaters. We have to develop skills like assertiveness and boundaries we never experienced as a child.

Whenever we change something we lose a little stability before it becomes our new normal. We can’t change too much at once. We need to make these changes slowly to make sure we actually have the energy we need to invest, while we learn the things that finally help us to safe more energy.

That is why phase 1 takes so much time for complex PTSD.

 

 

Hidden costs

We aren’t always aware of it, but our PTSD eats a ton of our energy.

• Avoidance: To avoid well we have to always be hypervigilant and subconsciously seek for signs of trouble and possible triggers. Then we make a great effort NOT to notice them and keep ourselves ignorant of problems. It takes an incredible amount of energy to keep that up all day long in every situation
• Denial: being a classic defense mechanism of our mind and most common with trauma and especially DID, denial often causes crisis-like situations where we feel crazy and struggle like mad. It is like burning a Ben Franklin from our energy budget.
• Hypervigilance: This is a physiological state of constant stress. We are hyper-aware of our surroundings, taking in way more information than a healthy person would, constantly screening our environment for trouble and always ready to jump. It is exhausting!
• Dissociation: this too is a physiological state, the one with the highest arousal levels in our nervous system. It burns energy like crazy. We are not aware of it because we are so shut down, but the effort of getting us so numb is extreme.
• Structural dissociation: keeping things split is a constant effort of our brain. Just having parts and especially parts who do all different things in our mind at the same time means we are basically burning the energy of several people, our brain and nervous system are in a state of crazy activity. The more we are split, the more it will cost, the less energy to manage life. The more parts act independently the harder it is on our bodies. That is why we practice synchronizing.
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The chronic stress we experience with our cPTSD needs to be addressed, if we want a life with more energy. When it comes to our energy budget and DID, living a more integrated life is the only solution.

We need a balance of freeing more and more energy in tiny steps and then re-investing it into freeing even more energy.

 

 

Paying off debt

To stop the process of constantly paying interest (sensory, emotional and other flashbacks) we need to integrate the things that have not been integrated before.

We can start with ‘unfinished business’, scenes from our life that keep coming back to haunt us. Maybe we made a mistake, maybe it is a shameful thing we can’t forget, a relationship status that is not properly defined, a promise we didn’t keep… most people have some kind of unfinished business. They steal energy because we constantly have to avoid them or spend energy regulating ourselves.

Then we work on integrating the trauma step by step. We can only ever work on paying off debt when we have excess strength we can throw at it. So therapy needs to be paced accordingly. When we are in the middle of processing trauma it is natural for other functioning to drop. It is a lot of mental energy needed. So it is wise to prepare for it and not to work on too much too fast.

We can cheat the system a little when we go inpatient and cut out responsibilities for a while, so we can focus on spending energy on bigger work, that will leave us with an increased budget when we return home. Needless to say that it will only work if the treatment program in the clinic is specialized on complex trauma and not adding to our stress.

 

The process of balancing our energy budget needs patience and time. We need to learn what we can do right now and start living within our means. It might help to pick up the idea from chronic illness patients and count ‘spoons’ for every day. Plan with energy to spare. It sounds weird for those who are used to being fully drained when the evening comes, but we don’t have to spend all the energy we have on a given day. You have permission to go to bed with some energy left.

Our daily life comes first, with a balance of gaining strength and cutting out unnecessary spending. We learn valuable things in this stabilization phase that will help us to be even better at managing our life when all the trauma work is over. I am not kidding, we first need something extra to throw at the trauma, almost like we have to mine our life for some gold first to be able to pay for the process of integrating memories.

With every processed memory our overall budget will increase and we won’t lose it all in flashbacks and dysregulation anymore. Things will get easier. It is worth all the effort.

 

I know this is not a satisfying answer. There is no miracle solution, no fast way to get more energy and go. It is all just more work on our list of things to learn.

 

 

A personal word

Our body cannot take the chronic stress forever. We are in our early 30s and we already struggle with several untreatable auto-immune and chronic pain problems that will only get worse from here. If you have the chance to start the process of mining energy and re-investing it into things that will relief the stress early in your life, please put yourself first. The rest of your life can wait. You don’t want to live with the chronic pain issues cPTSD can cause long-term.

If you have DID, please be aware of the extremely high cost of keeping up the structural dissociation. Trauma bodies can’t keep that up forever without developing some kind of other physical condition. It is not healthy to live dissociated. It is not a long-term solution. Not if we want a pain-free life to enjoy. It is already too late for me, but you might still have a chance.